English writer. Born in Russia, she was originally called Marta Aleksandrovna Almedingen and in later life used von Almedingen as her last name. She was a novelist, biographer and children's author, who was educated at the Xenia Institute for Noble Young Ladies, St. Petersburg. On her mother's side, she was descended from the aristocratic Poltoratsky family; her maternal grandfather was Serge Poltoratzky, the literary scholar and bibliophile who ended his days in exile, shuttling between France and England. His daughter Olga, the novelist's mother, grew up in Kent but was fascinated by her father's native Russia and in the early 1880s moved there, marrying Alexander Almedingen, who had turned his back on his family's military traditions to become a scientist. After her father abandoned his family in 1900, they lived in increasingly impoverished circumstances, described in her autobiographical book "Tomorrow Will Come". In September 1922 she got permission to leave post-revolutionary Russia and went to England, where she became a well-known children's author. In 1941 she won the $5,000 Atlantic Monthly Nonfiction Prize for "Tomorrow Will Come". Five years later she moved to Frogmore, a house near Upton Magna in Shropshire, where she remained until her death. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1951 and received the Book World Festival award in 1968.